Risk Aversion At Odds With Manned Space Exploration 371
Several readers including tyghe!! sent in a Popular Mechanics piece analyzing the Augustine Commission's recommendations and NASA itself in terms of a persistent bias towards risk aversion, and arguing that such a bias is fundamentally incompatible with the mission of opening a new frontier. "Rand Simberg, a former aerospace engineer finds the report a little too innocuous. In this analysis, Simberg asks, what happens when we take the risk out of space travel? ... Aerospace pioneer Burt Rutan said a few years ago that if we're not killing people, we're not pushing hard enough. That might sound harsh to people outside the aerospace community but, as Rutan knows, test pilots and astronauts are a breed of people that willingly accepts certain risk in order to be part of great endeavors. They're volunteers and they know what they're getting into."
Misses the point (Score:5, Informative)
Missing the point.
NASA execs used to claim the chances of a bad Shuttle accident were 1 in 10,000.
That's obviously crazy-- you'd have to shoot one up every day for 30 years to get even an unreliable estimate of that level of risk.
Feynman asked around, and the actual engineers estimated 1 in 100 to 1 in 200.
So a better question is, do the astronauts have a right to hear the CORRECT figures, not the wild wishful-thinking executive estimates?
Re:Misses the point (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Misses the point (Score:4, Informative)
Well, you missed the small text at the bottom of the page that said "*** per component" !
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Well, you missed the small text at the bottom of the page that said "*** per component" !
It's also worth noting that this sort of "component-based" risk assessment, where you determine the chance of failure based on the known probabilities of particular components failing, only predicts a tiny percentage of launch failures. The vast majority of launch failures are due to components failing in ways that weren't anticipated and/or flaws in the overall design. Rockets don't typically fail in the ways you expect them to.
Jeff Greason stated this rather elegantly during one of the Augustine Committee
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>>>Feynman pointed out that that this was like flying the space shuttle every day for 300 years without an accident.
That's 1 out of 300*365 days. In reality NASA had 2 blowups in 1300 days of flight. So 1 in 650 odds of catastrophic failure. I'd say the engineers doing the estimating are not doing a proper job, but then I've always thought risk analysis was more voodoo than reality (like counting how many angels dance on the head of a pin).
Re:Misses the point (Score:4, Insightful)
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The length of a shuttle mission probably doesn't affect the odds of disaster much, because the main risk is during launch and re-enrty. Planes have increased risk during takeoff and landing, but the length of the flight must affect the risk also. As long as your flight is near average length the per mile statistics should work just fine. Car trip accident odds are likely strongly related to distance driven. So when you compare a plane flight to a car trip be sure to compare it with a long car trip. The odd
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Actually, car trips should show a similar curve, since city driving has the highest risk of accidents. Once you get on the highway your accident risk goes down considerably. Of course, if you do get in an accident, the chance it'll be fatal for you goes up if it's on the highway -- the fact that car accidents are not usually fatal is an extra wrinkle in the whole thing...
It would be interesting to actually run the numbers.
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Just the other day I saw a figure of 1.4 traffic fatalities per 100 million miles driven. At that rate a 3000 mile trip would generate 0.000042 deaths, or 1 in 24,000 odds. Supposedly the odds of dying in an airliner are just under 1 in a million per flight hour. It comes out to 1 in 140,000 for an eight hour cross country flight by my calculations. So according to those figures a cross country flight is almost 6 times safer than a cross country car trip.
Yes you can rightly argue that interstate driving is
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Re:Misses the point (Score:4, Insightful)
>>>Feynman pointed out that that this was like flying the space shuttle every day for 300 years without an accident.
That's 1 out of 300*365 days. In reality NASA had 2 blowups in 1300 days of flight. So 1 in 650 odds of catastrophic failure.
Worse than that, I think -- doing the Chi-square test (single tail lower bound, time-terminated test) I make it about 1 in 420 days (60% confidence), 1 in 210 days (95% confidence). Dividing time by failures is significantly over-optimistic when the number of failures is low. The usual rule of thumb if you don't have a spreadsheet or Chi-square tables to hand is to divide by the number of failures plus 1, which in this case gives about 1 in 430, somewhere near the 60% confidence point. That avoids claiming infinite reliability if you have zero failures, when all it really means is that the test hasn't run for long enough to give useful results.
Re:Misses the point (Score:5, Informative)
I'll assume you were repeating something someone else said but next time try a quick internet search before passing it on.
Both missions where Challenger and Columbia were destroyed were launched in January not February.
The launches were 17 not 20 years apart.
They were not launched on the same day. (Challenger launched on Jan 28, 1986, Columbia launched on Jan 16, 2003)
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/shuttlemissions/archives/sts-51L.html [nasa.gov]
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/shuttlemissions/archives/sts-107.html [nasa.gov]
Re:Misses the point (Score:5, Interesting)
According to this article [reason.com] your lifetime chance of dying in a car crash is 1 in 83.
Per-person odds, I'd take a one-time shuttle ride over a lifetime of driving.
Re:Misses the point (Score:4, Funny)
"According to this article [reason.com] your lifetime chance of dying in a car crash is 1 in 83."
I am pretty sure my lifetime chances of dying in a spacecraft accident are much slimmer
Re:Misses the point (Score:5, Funny)
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And I'd argue that not everyone has the same chance of dying in a car crash. For instance, this morning I had to go around someone that will almost certainly perish in the next week or so if he keeps driving in the fashion I witnessed (if not from a crash, because someone will just take him out...but probably because of a crash). I, on the other hand, am omniscient and omnipotent behind the wheel, invincible save for the malice of others.
Not like a space shuttle. They're all pretty much in the same boat, r
Re:Misses the point (Score:4, Insightful)
That feeling of control over the odds is probably why we put up with relatively high possibility of injury or fatality with cars. Airline travel seems to bother people much more because they're not in control of the situation. If we had much longer lifespans we might think twice about cars killing off 1% of us every century.
Re:Misses the point (Score:5, Insightful)
So a better question is, do the astronauts have a right to hear the CORRECT figures, not the wild wishful-thinking executive estimates?
What makes you think they aren't aware of the true risks of what's involved? Who else would be in a better position to know them? I've always assumed the drivel that comes out of the NASA execs is intended for public consumption. The astronauts themselves are aware of what they are getting into.
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>>>I've always assumed the drivel that comes out of the NASA execs is intended for public consumption
It's never a good idea to lie to your boss (the people). They might catch you in the lie, and then you've lost their trust. Or worse - they might revolt.
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I don't think they are. The odds come out to ~1 in 50 flights having a fatal accident. Now, even with columbia, that makes the Shuttle the safest spacecraft ever, but that's still pretty crappy. Now, the reason I think they're getting smoke blown up their arses about the shuttle specifically is that some of them have families.
1 in 50 is an insane risk for someone with kids to come home to. No sane parent would take those odds. And definitely no one would compound the risk by repeatedly casting the die.
Re:Misses the point (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that trained astronauts with advanced degrees in usually scientific fields are probably about as capable of figuring out the statistical chances of a fatal mission as people on slashdot are.
Call me crazy, but I'm assuming that NASA isn't lobotomizing their astronauts.
People take risks because to them, the payout for the risk is greater than the potential downside. For astronauts, obviously, the benefits of doing missions are greater than the pitfalls of dying on missions. You can doubt their wisdom in making those choices, but I think you're being a bit absurd if you think they aren't aware of or capable of figuring out the numbers.
Almost certainly not true (Score:3, Interesting)
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Of course they are aware of the risks, and I can assure you, they *don't care*. I am sure they would object to any specific item that was clearly dangerous, but as an overall statistical risk, it's not even on their minds. There were *plenty* of volunteers to launch critical national payloads right after the Challenger incident.
Brett
Re:Misses the point (Score:4, Interesting)
So a better question is, do the astronauts have a right to hear the CORRECT figures, not the wild wishful-thinking executive estimates?
Do you really think the original badasses who fought hard to be a part of the program were concerned with the executive estimates?
THAT statement is a perfect example of the difference between now and then. They knew damn well that risk was a major part of it; they flew in the face of it anyway. Today, we care more about someone's calculated "risk aversion" numbers than we do about staring in the face of a challenge, albeit it risky, and going for it. If someone's willing to risk it all to meet the challenge, we don't need some desk jockey's numbers stopping him or her.
Re:Misses the point (Score:5, Interesting)
People need to stop and think a little. Back in the 1400's and 1500's when people were exploring the world, who went out? Was it the candy asses? Did the mama's boys go forth? The fruit cakes who dressed up as dandies to hang around a court yard in some dank castle? Of course not.
I can write paragraphs badmouthing old Chris Columbus, and the conquistadors who put much of Latin America to the torch, raping, murdering, and plundering. Paragraphs? Hell, I could write books! But, despite that, they were badass mofos. Yeah, they had a lot of luck on their side, not to mention some slightly advanced technology, germ warfare was on their side, and they had better warfare strategies and tactics. But, they were badasses, willing to put their lives on the line.
The same goes for all the other settlers who came to the new world. Candy asses and sissies who counted the risk assessment beans stayed at home, or at least waited many years for the real bad asses to create a safe place for them.
Today? Phhht.
I put my faith in SpaceX and places like China to put man into space. The US government has to many bean counters who won't risk losing a few beans.
I've said it before, I'll repeat it here. I'll haul my ass up onto that rocket making a one-way trip to Mars. Light that big bastard off, and send me on my way. You would do better to send a younger man - but if you can't find one with the balls to go, I'm ready. Just send the equipment and supplies necessary for the job, and I'll put in a few years work, trying to find a reason that convinces the candy asses that it is worth sending a colony to Mars.
Don't worry about any silly assed funeral when I finally croak - when the time comes, I'll drop my drawers and lie face down in plain site of the earth. Those who count will remember me - and the rest can kiss my ass.
Re:Misses the point (Score:5, Interesting)
>>>The US government has to many bean counters who won't risk losing a few beans.
And yet they spend ~2000 billion on bank bailouts, corporate bailouts, and "stimulus" bills without even reading the fucking laws. I thought it was funny when Conyers said, "People keep saying read the bill. Have you seen the bill? It's over 1000 pages long and requires two lawyers sitting by my side to explain what it means! We don't have time to read the bill. We need to get it passed."
So they just vote "aye" and hope for the best. I'm sure if they can spend all that, without even knowing what they are spending it on, they can spare 0.1 billion for NASA each year.
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It's not funny, it's ironic.
If your representatives don't understand what they're passing, they're no longer in control. Those two lawyers, and whoever pays them, are.
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You'll be known as the "3rd Moon of Mars".
Don't know much about history... (Score:4, Interesting)
The fruit cakes who dressed up as dandies to hang around a court yard in some dank castle? Of course not
It was the disinherited - the landless - the second and third sons of the nobility - who ventured out.
The eldest son would have been nailed to the floor if he tried.
The Admiral of the Ocean Sea intended to set up shop somewhere off the Chinese coast and become the funnel for all trade with the West.
The conquisitor was going for the gold.
In 1624 Captain John Smith published a bill of particulars - a shopping list for the prospective colonist. It makes interesting reading:
John Smith's Bill: Then & Now [americanheritage.com]
Capt. Smith was at heart a bean counter and his profession, survival:
At one point, when Newport returned a second time with seventy settlers, among them a perfumer and six tailors, Smith, never one to keep his opinions to himself, penned a Rude Reply to his London superiors:
"When you send againe I entreat you rather send but thirty carpenters, husbandmen, gardiners, blacksmiths, masons, and diggers up of trees, roots, well provided, than a thousand of such as we have. For except we be able to lodge and feed them, the most will [be lost therough] want of necessaries before they can be made good for anything."
Was John Smith a Liar? [americanheritage.com]
The astronauts would go anyway... (Score:3, Insightful)
Even if they made (eg.) a "one way" trip to Mars you'd have people queuing around the block to sign up.
I'd go.
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If it's not EXPLICITLY stated in the US Constitution then they don't; and it is TYRANNICAL for any government to force anyone facing extreme danger to be properly informed of that fact! America isn't a COMMUNIST country, at least not yet.
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>>>If it's not EXPLICITLY stated in the US Constitution then they don't;
Actually the U.S. Constitution is quite clear - the power to spend money on space launches belongs to the 50 State governments. Just like how the EU is not empowered to do launches, but France, the UK, and so on are.
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Actually, since space flight is essential for defence (spy satellites), general welfare (weather satellites) and interstate commerce (communication satellites), it is quite clearly within the power and duty of Federal government to spend money on.
Re:Misses the point (Score:4, Insightful)
>>>since space flight is essential for defence (spy satellites) and interstate commerce (communication satellites)
Second point: Congress *regulates* interstate commerce; it does not participate. Else it would be able to kill-off Ford, Microsoft, and Panasonic, and build cars, computers, and TVs directly. The U.S. has not been granted that power to DO interstate commerce - only to regulate it. ----- First point on defense: Fair enough. But how does that justify sending shuttles up in space to study how plants grow? That is not constitutional. Instead of NASA's toys, we should simply have the Army launching non-manned rockets to position the satellites.
>>>general welfare
That's only the first half of the sentence. You need to read the WHOLE sentence. To quote the Author of the Constitution James Madison - "For what purpose could the enumeration of particular powers be inserted, if these and all others were meant to be included in the preceding general power? Nothing is more natural nor common than first to use a general phrase, and then to explain and qualify it by a recital of particulars. But the idea of an enumeration of particulars which neither explain nor qualify the general meaning, and can have no other effect than to confound and mislead, is an absurdity." (Federalist 41)
He further clarifies: "If Congress can do whatever in their discretion can be done by money, and will promote the General Welfare, the Government is no longer a limited one, possessing enumerated powers, but an indefinite one, subject to particular exceptions." (James Madison, Letter to Edmund Pendleton, January 21, 1792)
And finally if you're still confused, just read the Supreme Law for yourself, which makes clear most powers belong to the State governments, not Congress: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
Operationally the United States is like the European Union:
Most of the power is still held by individual state governments.
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This is exactly why the Bill of Rights faced heavy opposition, as it turned the whole idea of things on its head and set a precedent that the Constitution had to forbid the federal government from doing something.
Then again, it's far better than the precedent some have tried to set by using an amendment to prevent people from having certain rights.
Except the part of the Bill of Rights that specifically states the federal government only has the powers delegated by the constitution (10th amendment)
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
The founders were very careful not to set such a precedent.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Right. And then the 1930s-era Supreme Court declared the Tenth Amendment has no meaning, thereby giving Congress a blank check to do virtually anything it wants.
The good news is that more-recent court decisions (1992 and 97) have revived the 10th Amendment as protection against the U.S. forcing states to enact laws the states do not desire to enact. For example the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act required state and local law enforcement officials to conduct background checks on persons attempting t
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Risk aversion stems from funding sources (Score:5, Insightful)
IMHO, a big reason why NASA spends so much time on risk aversion is the fickle, uneducated, uninformed and misinformed nature of who they get their funding from aka Congress. I offer into evidence the fact that McGovern wanted desperately to kill off Apollo after the Apollo 1 fire. Traditional market-based sources of funding can evaporate after a major disaster but there will always be people who believe in the mission statement and they don't change with the political winds.
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Yes, Mondale, thanks.
Re:Risk aversion stems from funding sources (Score:5, Insightful)
Space exploration and innovation is something that is far too important to be left in the hands of the "American public" or Congress.
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It's the bullshit media that likes to build up the drama and dangers of space travel in order to sell.
This leads the political establishment to react thinking they need to look good in having silly hearings, pushing for this and that.
Thus the NASA becomes nervous and more risk averse.
Not that I am putting the blame on the media alone just that they are a big part of this and the lack of spine among Congress
Depends on the "Purpose" (Score:5, Insightful)
But this gets back to the "purpose" of manned missions. If manned missions are merely a PR stunt or a prestige tool, then dead astronauts are not going to help that cause. Remote robots are a safer and cheaper way to do science. I don't accept the argument that you need an on-site human to spot rocks. Until the rocks are examined by lab equipment, nobody knows whats really in them anyhow.
I propose that the primary goal be to learn[1] about space colonization, and a perm moon-base is a good place to start. They would be space pioneers, and everyone knows pioneers risk arrows in their backs. This is a role Americans can relate to and would accept risk for because our ancestors faced the same situation. (Even "Native Americans" made a risky migration out of Asia. There are no true "Native Americans".)
[1] We are a long way off from self-sufficient colonies, but you have to start somewhere.
Re:Depends on the "Purpose" (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm not so certain we can extrapolate the future based on what we currently know. It's better to have some practical knowledge of space colonization than have none. In general, it's good to have manned space knowledge and ability. Perhaps a real Bruce Willis in Space moment will come upon us.
I agree there is no single reason to justify it, but there are 5 pretty-good reasons that weighed as a sum, favor a manned colony:
1. Colonization learning curve
2. Bruce-Willis-like emergency readiness.
3. Science
4. National prestige and inspiration factor
5. Side technological benefits (new materials, etc.)
Perhaps we as a nation are confused because we cannot find a single good reason. But that may be a mistake.
You raised some good points, though, that help us clarify this.
Re:Depends on the "Purpose" (Score:4, Informative)
"I agree on the cost issue, though. Instead of spending a million bucks to develop a space pen that writes in zero-G, The Ruskies used pencils. Duh."
Of course that's not true. The designer of the space pen spent a million dollars developing it. The reason for developing it was because pencils could be hazardous in zero gravity and high oxygen environments.
They were sold to NASA for $2.95 a piece. Before the pen was developed NASA used lead pencils.
NASA Space Pen [snopes.com]
Re:Risk aversion stems from funding sources (Score:4, Insightful)
If we could find a way to make space exploration more like meatpacking, with lots of undocumented immigrants toiling in danger and obscurity, public acceptance of risk would go right back up.
There's a certain bitter irony, actually. The public is fairly intolerant of risk-seeking behaviors among consenting adults with access to information and enough other choices available to make their behavior truly "voluntary"; but generally has a high tolerance for risks taken by ill-informed people under economic pressure.
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The difference between then and now is that the political climate was one of "We must beat the Russians at all costs" - as such alot of people got to play with the frontiers of knowledge. We're at a point in history where international struggles don't contribute much to the space programme. Business does. We're in a recession, and the space programme is at the mercy of budget cuts. There is more than one dissenting voice in congress now.
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Which is sad because, in the long run, the technology developed from space exploration would be a big boon to the economy. Just think of all the technologies that would have to be developed, or at least further developed, for a Mars mission.
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Name me one company, just one, that has provided a significant and continuous source of funding for a major project that it believed in, even when the going got tough.
Just one.
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Apple Computer.
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Westinghouse didn't waver when Edison was waging his FUD and lobbying campaign against them. The railroad industry was plagued with disasters and bad press for many years but kept building out their infrastructure and are still around today. The White Star line didn't stop building ships after the Titanic sunk.
There's three examples right off the top of my head. I'm sure others can think of more.
It's not just NASA (Score:5, Insightful)
American society is risk averse to pathological levels in general.
I wonder (Score:3, Insightful)
I wonder if that's because it's run by lawyers, bankers, and insurance companies?
On an even deeper philosophical level, when you are only encouraged to measure success by wealth, I don't think anyone should be surprised at the shortsighted nature of American innovation at the moment. Many hard problems are not profitable to solve, so all of our capital is flooding into financial services and marketing. I don't imagine we can make a space program out of that.
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Many hard problems are not profitable to solve, so all of our capital is flooding into financial services and marketing.
So make them profitable to solve. Want to help solve climate change? Get rid of the regulatory/legal processes that give an inordinate amount of power to the NIMBY/BANANA crowd. Why should I invest my capital in wind farms or a nuclear power plant when a handful of loud assholes can tie me up in court for years before I even get to break ground? Everybody wants green energy but nobody wants to look at a wind farm or cooling tower. Everybody wants good wireless service but nobody wants to look at a cell
Re:I wonder (Score:5, Insightful)
You've got it backwards.
Mass transit isn't profitable because it's efficient. Solar power isn't profitable because coal isn't properly taxed for the amount of damage it does to the ecosystem, or when a slurry wall fails and kills a few hundred people directly. Batteries are expensive because the cost of maintaining hegemony in the Middle East is hidden in our defense budget, and not tacked on to the price of a gallon of gas.
There are many things that the market is piss poor at valuing. There are many services better considered as infrastructure than as a luxury, like transportation, health care, electricity, and telecommunications. That's why when you look across the world, large state sectors dominate economically. They have spread out the cost and benefits of this infrastructure, and raised the standard of living for everyone. Weak states, where the market has no boundaries, perform very poorly in comparison. They are subject to more devastating economic cycles, corruption, monopoly practices, and so on.
There is no need to engage in philosophical debates. You can simply look at the economic history of the last thirty years, and compare America to Canada, England, France, and Germany. America now has the highest unemployment, worst income inequality, pays the most portion for basic services, transportation, health care, and education. Our savings have evaporated. The dollar only holds value as far as China is willing to lend us money. We have no way to create things that other people want to buy because we don't have a manufacturing sector. The leftover bits of prosperity from the postwar period will not last forever.
This is not progress. In fact, the cost of doing business has gone up so much that there is now "political support" - meaning, some corporate support - for health care reform after 30 years of majority support for a single payer system. A market, properly calibrated by regulation, can do amazing things when it increases competition. Remove the corrective effects of good governance, and it turns into a nightmare.
Re:I wonder (Score:4, Insightful)
The actual unemployment rate for the US is nearly 17%. The 10% figure we are at now doesn't consider prisoners, those who are underemployed, and those who have given up on looking for work more than 6 months ago. France is around 10%, and as far as I can tell, they do include these numbers.
If you look more closely at the numbers, it gets even more interesting. Look at "working age" unemployment, between 22 and 55, and the numbers look even worse for America. That's because most people are allowed to have an education for free, so they don't work until they graduate. And once they have reached retirement age, Europeans actually retire. They haven't been bankrupted by an illness. They have kept their pensions, since they demand accountability from their corporations. And there's no data to suggest they weren't as productive as an American worker, even though they have three to five weeks of vacation every year. The desire of my fellow countrymen to continue working harder for less never ceases to amaze me.
As far as social medicine goes, it takes only a moment to realize that early treatment for everyone is far cheaper than emergency treatment for everyone. So, unless you can get hospitals to be more blunt about letting poor people die just outside their doors, and start denying accident victims with their guts hanging out entry into the ER, you aren't really solving the problem. You're just pretending.
Re:I wonder (Score:4, Interesting)
So your argument is we need to artificially raise the cost of energy. That sounds like an economic winner.
That's not artificial. There is a real cost that SOMEONE will have to pay eventually. These are called externalities. You cannot allow an industry to externalize the expense associated with their product to the point where there's no competition.
>What does "hegemony" in the Middle East have to do with the price of a gallon of gas? The bulk of our imported oil comes from friendly Western hemisphere sources. Europe and China are much more reliant on Middle Eastern oil than we are -- perhaps we should let them try their hand at stabilizing the region?
Well, there are several political realities here. First is that we are in the middle east precisely to have veto power over other nations. It's a political power play that's been going on since the British navy switched from steam to diesel.
However, if you cut out the availability of Middle East Oil, you would see prices as they were in the 70s. The simple fact that we are reliant on an external entity for our cheap transportation means it isn't cheap. It's just cheap right now.
All countries that don't have to pay the full cost of their own national defense, by virtue of being under the American umbrella. How much would England, Germany and France have spent on defense in the latter half of the 20th century if they had to build up the forces on their own to deter the Warsaw Pact?
They may have spent more. I doubt they would have refused to defend themselves. It's difficult to extract the guns and butter question from the Cold War, I can agree, but that ended 20 years ago. If the cold war was really the driving force behind our military expenditure, whey didn't it dramatically fall after the CCCP collapsed?
The market can value every one of those things just fine if people would stop interfering with it. The reason we have a piss poor last mile telecommunications infrastructure in this country is because of Government granted monopolies.
It's because corporations were handed the keys at all. If they have 95% coverage in an area, they do not give a shit about the last 5%. The only entity that would sanely care about 100% saturation would be a highly regulated non-profit or county level telco. If there were no regulation, the US would look just like Latin American countries where the rich suburbs are wired, sewered, watered, and the rest of the country is left to their own devices.
One of the reasons our health care system is in shambles is because a huge health care customer (Uncle Sam, via Medicare) pays below-market rates for services rendered, thus leading to the rest of us being charged more to make up the difference. I want to scream at the TV every single time somebody mentions Medicare as a model because it has "lower costs" -- it's easy to have "lower costs" when you don't even pay a break-even price to the provider of the services you receive.
America pays 16% of GDP for it's healthcare. The rest of Europe pays less than 10% of GDP, and they are just as healthy, and they all have coverage. You're going to have to overcome that fact before you have a persuasive argument.
Medicare is an interesting example. It works so well that when they allowed private corporations to compete, they couldn't. Private Medicare providers receive government subsidies just to stay in business. I don't see any reason to create a profit motive where the need for one doesn't exist.
Transportation would also work better if Government would stop picking winners and losers. Why don't trucks have to pay full price for the damage they do to the roadways? Perhaps if they did other methods of moving goods around (trains, waterways, etc) would be more competitive. Instead we effectively subsidize the trucking industry with our taxes that
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Example One. [youtube.com]
Example Two. [youtube.com]
Example Three. [youtube.com]
I could find more examples, but I don't have time to find them for you. Needless to say there are a lot of Americans that aren't risk averse. Wait what am I saying, there are just a lot of stupid people who don't realize how dangerous the things they are doing really are.
Life is terminal (Score:5, Insightful)
After reading about some of those guys, if you made the program too safe, they'd take up free climbing or something else to get the rush. The possibility of dying early gives it that rush.
We're such a death phobic society - no wonder terrorists can just flinch and send us into girly girl panics.
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We're such a death phobic society - no wonder terrorists can just flinch and send us into girly girl panics
It didn't use to be that way. I'm trying to put my finger on when this happened -- but once you almost die in an auto wreck, you're going to wear your seat belt. I'm guessing it happened with 9-11 and the government/media reaction. The terrorists won.
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If you almost die in an auto wreck, you are going to wear your safety belt.
What happened with 9-11 is more like getting a bad concussion in an auto wreck and then never driving or riding in a car again, and blowing up the dealership that sold you the car.
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If you almost die in an auto wreck, you are going to wear your safety belt.
What happened with 9-11 is more like getting a bad concussion in an auto wreck and then never driving or riding in a car again, and blowing up the dealership that sold you the car.
Don't forget blowing up a nearby dealership that had nothing to do with your car wreck, but had dealings with your daddy.
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I'd say it's a perfectly natural reaction to the way society has evolved. We are continuously improving medicine and safety so that less and less people die early of injury and illness. The average life expectancy has gone somewhat up too, but the outliers have gotten a lot smaller. If you survive your first year there's a 90% probability you'll be 55+ years old and 70% probability of becoming 70+ and that is total figures including all Darwin award winners, suicides, drug overdoses and whatnot. Normal heal
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Thankfully... (Score:2, Interesting)
... China and India will do some pretty awesome things in the next couple of decades, by using the go go go mentality we had in the 60s.
Hopefully, getting passed in current race will take us back to that attitude.
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It's already happening, the same way it went with GM, Ford and Chrysler vs Honda, Toyota, Nissan.
You have to be pro-active with these things. If you're only reactive then it's already too late and the curve just to catch up to your competition is even harder, makes it look even more impossible, making you give up more easily.
Worst of both worlds (Score:2)
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The Challenger accident was 22 years ago, but people still bring it up to show how unsafe the shuttle is.
That's probably to remind you that it is in fact a deathtrap. It has no escape system and is subject to multiple unnecessary failure modes due to its launch configuration and trying to make it look like an airplane.
NASA is not risk-adverse at all. They've been making people fly in that dangerous Rube Goldberg contraption for decades. It was obvious in the first few years that the Shuttle was never going to be cost-effective, reliable or safe. If they had canned it back then and replaced it with a reasonable
Re:Worst of both worlds (Score:4, Informative)
Airliners are probably about 10**8 times less likely to spontaneously explode in flight than rockets.
Maybe the Shuttle designers thought that they had somehow circumvented that fact, but events proved otherwise.
Comment on test-piloting (Score:4, Insightful)
Attributed to an old test pilot: "Come on. My job is to get in an airplane that's never flown before, of a design that's never flown before, usually with lots of parts that've never been used in an airplane before, and go up and find out what it's performance limits are, usually by going past them. This is not an inherently safe activity.". I think most astronauts would agree with that sentiment. They know it's a risky activity, and they're there because they want to be there doing this strongly enough to outweigh the inherent risks. They'd probably rather not take stupid and unnecessary risks, but if it's a choice between taking the risks and never seeing space, well, to quote from Leslie Fish, "And before you take my dream / I will see you in Hell.".
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Another piece of related gallows humor: "Never forget that your [spacecraft]* was manufactured by the lowest bidder."
*Original version, military-oriented, used "weapon" in this spot. For test pilots, many of whom were military and test-flying warplanes, this is a perfect 100% correlation.
Discovering the unknown, whether the unknown flight characteristics of a new prototype airplane or the unknown "out there" in space (or even across an uncharted ocean, 500 years ago) is a risky proposition.
The situation we
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Besides, adrenalin is fun stuff.
Low rewards calls for low risk (Score:2)
What NASA trying to reduce t
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NASA has been handed a nickle and has been asked to build a castle. NASA has not made any significant contributions since Apollo because they have been on an ever tightening budget with ever expanding demand for action. Its amazing that they have managed to hold on for this long. Give them a reasonable budget (50 to 100 billion/year) and we would have a permanent moon/mars colonies, the ability to deflect potentially killer NEOs such as Apophis (1/45000 chance of impact in 2036 with an impact of almost 900
How soon we forget (Score:3, Insightful)
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It's a dangerous business stepping out your door........
I too will guarantee that for everyone living and reading this right now, death is a 100% certainty.
Get over it, no pain no gain.
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He was right. Sailing West from Portugal to India was a stupid and dangerous idea.
Lives are risked for things much less important (Score:4, Insightful)
Not Just Risk to Human Lives (Score:2)
Putting astronauts in danger is not the only risk which we fearfully avoid. There is very little willingness to pour resources into cutting edge technologies. New technologies could fail, or they could revolutionize space travel, but we won't know if we're not willing to explore the possibilities. Rather than exploring something like nuclear propulsion or a launch loop, we spend billions developing another chemical rocket platform, and in some respects taking a step back from the abilities of the Space Shut
War vs. New Frontiers, or: What's wrong with us? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:War vs. New Frontiers, or: What's wrong with us (Score:2)
Wars today a perfect example of risk aversion (Score:3, Insightful)
because we certainly don't fight to win. We take incredible precaution to not harm the "civilians" and wonder why there never seems to and end to the war or an end to the other sides ability to recruit.
We have become such a risk averse culture in the West that we could not fight World War ][ all over again because too many would be screaming about killing non-direct combatants. You don't win a war by being nice. You win in by breaking the spirit of the opponent and their support mechanism. Its mean, its
Exactly (Score:5, Funny)
My half elven paladin has exactly the same thinking as an astronaut. He knows the risks. He knows that no matter how many elixirs of healing he brings, no matter whether his friend Drugar the Troll Barbarian is sober or not, things might go south. You think you're raiding an underground goblin camp, you open that door and BAM! Red frickin' dragon. Not much you can do about a red dragon at close range except poor some good ol' A1 steak sauce on yourself to make a worthwhile meal.
Sometimes you rummage around in your sack for treasure and it turns out to be a bag of devouring. That's all I'm sayin'.
It has more to do with the American Public (Score:2)
What "manned space exploration"? Who's exploring? (Score:2, Interesting)
Not just the space program... (Score:2, Flamebait)
A few years ago in WWI&II casualties were in the thousands and hundreds of thousands. Now they are in the dozens yet there is more protest over them than before. Life-support for people who are already dead costs millions and consumes resources otherwise usable for those that still have a chance. Prisons are full of career criminals who are little more
"Risk Assessment" not "Risk Aversion" (Score:3, Insightful)
"Risk Aversion" is meaningless, we all want to minimize risk.
What you really want is accurate "Risk Assessment" so that a "good" astronaut can say
"sorry, that's too risky for me"
And........ Only report the successful missions, since the American public, in general,
is incapable of wrapping their collective heads around the concept of "Risk Assessment".
This is an oversimplification (Score:3, Interesting)
IAASE (I am a safety engineer). This is a silly question to even ask. It's not possible to "take the risk out of space travel". It's not possible to take the risk out of anything - getting out of bed is risky (you might slip and fall) but so is staying in bed (you might get bedsores). The best we can hope for is to 1) identify the risks involved in space travel, 2) mitigate the ones we can, and then 3) decide whether the remaining risk is worth taking. And there are a whole lot of people in this thread advocating for taking these risks with other people's lives, or volunteering to take these risks themselves in spite of the fact that they don't really understand their severity or probability.
People on slashdot need to get a realistic understanding of what we get out of space travel. The benefits consist of 1) scientific progress - which for the most part can be obtained just as successfully and more cheaply with automated systems, and 2) glory and adventure. I submit that glory and adventure in themselves are not a very good reason to get people killed, especially people who haven't been able to provide actual informed consent to the risks.
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Re:So, let's kill em all? Only way to be sure (Score:5, Funny)
The only way to be sure to "kill em all" is to nuke them from orbit, but that requires a Space Program.
Re:I doubt there'll be much progress from us now (Score:4, Insightful)
On the other hand, there can be too much of a thing. Exploration, be it arctic, submarine, or interplanetary, is inherently dangerous. Nevertheless, it needs to be done. We need to get off of this single basket and onto other planets or our species is done. That is not generally considered in the life value equation and it needs to be.
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>>"I think that western society has correctly reassessed the value of life. When you consider that it costs roughly 200k to raise a child in the United States, trading that human's life for certain goals is not necessarily worthwhile now, while it would have been worthwhile 200 or even 100 years ago. "
If what you write is true, then Western society will be (is?) in decline. Others who make a different valuation will take the risks. They will reap the rewards - as well they should. We'll be the poor
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So if it costs $400K to raise a child and get them ready to be an astronaut, why should we add Billions of dollars cost to ensure their safety? Remember, this is a person willing to take the risk. Why should safety cost SO much more than the person?
Now when they had doubt about laun
Re:I doubt there'll be much progress from us now (Score:4, Insightful)
I think that western society has correctly reassessed the value of life
Life is valuable but our efforts to protect it have gone too far in the other direction. We spend inordinate amounts of money trying to build a risk free world rather than accepting the fact that some activities/professions are inherently dangerous. We've created a society of sheep that scare easily and run crying to the nearest lawyer and/or politician whenever some reminder that life can actually still be dangerous smacks them across the face. To borrow one of the best /. sig's I've ever seen: If you spend all your time childproofing the world you aren't going to have any time to worldproof your child.
Some things are worth risking your life over. Would you volunteer to go into space if the opportunity presented itself? Would you volunteer to test an experimental AIDS or cancer vaccine? Would you assist a fellow citizen who was being victimized by some thug? Would you jump into the ocean to save a drowning person? Would you intervene if you saw someone being attacked by an animal?
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Ca
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When you consider that it costs roughly 200k to raise a child in the United States, trading that human's life for certain goals...
That was the most appalling thing I've read all day. So what is YOUR life worth?
What are you, a hit man or something?
Wait, let me guess, you're the guy who was CEO of the company that chained the fire doors in the chicken plant shut so that the workers wouldn't steal chicken parts before it burned to the ground, right? I mean, they were poor people, not worth anything. Or the guy
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> scumbag [...] lawyers and the sooner there are legal moves to BAN thme all
Yeah! We need to initiate LEGAL MOVES to ban all lawyers. Wait, what?
Space Flight is risky (Score:2)
So is staying on this planet...
Film of recreation of the Chicxulub impact on the NatGeo, Science and History channels...
The only way to be sure of the long term survival of the human race is to get off this rock.